Nile Gardiner is a Washington-based foreign affairs analyst and political commentator. A former aide to Margaret Thatcher, Gardiner has served as a foreign policy adviser to two US presidential campaigns. He appears frequently on American and British television, including Fox News Channel, BBC, and Fox Business Network.

Hillary Clinton forgot the Anglo-American Special Relationship

In what may be a sign of things to come with the Obama Administration, the next Secretary of State Hillary Clinton failed to even mention the Anglo-American Special Relationship in her confirmation hearing statement. Considering the U.S.-UK partnership is Washington’s most important alliance by a country mile, and that over 10,000 British troops are fighting alongside their American partners in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was a stunning omission.

Mrs. Clinton only mentioned the U.K. once, in the broader context of transatlantic relations, and only after France and Germany. Both Mexico and Canada merited greater attention than Britain. Even more strikingly President-elect Obama himself has never mentioned Britain in a major policy speech.

Judging by some of the key appointments in the State Department and Pentagon, the Obama White House is likely to make a strengthening of relations with Paris, Berlin and Brussels a foreign policy priority, with a more distinctly pro-European outlook, including support for European defence integration and the broader European Project.

It would be a huge mistake for the next U.S. administration to downgrade or weaken the Special Relationship. Great Britain is the only U.S. ally able to project military power across the world, and the close-knit defence and intelligence cooperation between the two powers is vital to the security of the free world.

The Anglo-American alliance is the engine that drives the global war against Islamist terrorism, and it is British troops who are doing the heavy lifting on the battlefields of southern Afghanistan while most of Europe looks on. At the end of the day, when the chips are down, it is always the British who stand shoulder to shoulder with their American allies, a fact the next U.S. administration should not forget.